iPhone Game Review: Inotia 3: Children of CarniaReviewed by JadeDragon

First there was the Chronicles of Inotia: Legend of Feanor, a game tells a story of darkness and evil spirits invading the peaceful land of Inotia. It was a long journey filled with adventures, quests, alliances and betrayals. Com2uS since then has made Inotia into a long lasting saga with Inotia 2: A Wanderer of Luone and now Inotia 3: Children of Carnia. In the third installment of this RPG series, your hero Lucio embarks on another long journey through the land of Carnia and its neighboring regions to discover new evil and make new alliances. Inotia 3 again is filled with solid gameplay that has non stop hacking and slashing, full character upgrades and a large number of quests. The graphics aren't anything new, but monster designs are brand new and they come in large varieties.

Gameplay

Like with Inotia 2, you get a party system where three allies fight along side of each other. You can choose a class for the main hero and get a priest and a warrior to join you on your journey. Like with other Com2uS RPGs, each character has different set of skills and learns more as they go up in levels. These skills populate the quick action slots and provide you with some add bonus in fighting, healing or magic. You can switch to control anyone in your party during the game. This is a very useful thing in tough fights, because often the leading hero takes the most damage, and you can switch to your strongest one at the moment to lead the fight then let him rest to recovery more health while using another hero to lead. While you control one hero, his or her allies will fight or heal on their own and often very effective at using their own weapons and powers.

Inotia 3 has a large collection of enemies; all live in their native lands and have leveled attacks. Creatures and elements aren?t randomly place, rather they are carefully selected from indigenous spices like deer live in the forests, bears in the mountain, spiders in caves, Mammoth in high up snowy peaks. Elements too are well placed. Leveled monsters mean that you will encounter the monsters that have the same level as your heroes or a couple of levels above, making the game engaging enough yet not so hard that your heroes die all the time and break down the flow of the gameplay.

Inotia 3 has a huge map for an RPG on a mobile device. Tap on the Map icon on the top right corner, you will get a map of your current locations with all exits marked clearly, and tap again to get the world map. Each location in the world of Inotia 3 is marked to give you a sense where you are and where your quests will take you. Terrain and dungeons too show lots of variations which keep the gameplay interesting and never give you the feeling that you are going through a few areas over and over again. Villages are the only places in the game that will look familiar and usually comprises a chief, a grocer, a weapon seller, an armor merchant and some random quest givers. Also each village or town has a spiritual person who can revive your dead party members, and an inn where you can rest and recover your stats.

Graphics & Sound

While the gameplay feels solid, graphics quality hasn?t changed much since Inotia 2. Some parts of the terrain even look similar, but what Inotia 3 added was variety. Most of the maps you go through look different from the last locale, and dungeons too have their own uniqueness. A tomb looks completely different from a monster lair; a cemetery looks different from a windy cave. If you are looking for ultra sharp graphics, you won?t get in Inotia 3. But if you are looking for a new world to explore after Inotia 2 has unveiled all her pulchritude, then Inotia 3 provides plenty of locations and dungeons to keep your eyes occupied.

Inotia 3 has soothing background music to balance the hectic fighting visually. BMG does a good job to fill the silence while not being too jarring to call your attention away from the gameplay. Plus, the loud, jarring effect is the forte of sound FX in the game. Each monster has its own sound bites when being hit by your oversized hammer or sword, some scream, others yelp, but each is different from the last. If the sound of screaming gets nerve grading, the game offers on/off switches for both music and sound FX along with an option to make your own iPod much playlist.

Conclusion

The amount of gameplay that?s filled with quests, a large of enemies and locations should warrant the price of admission. For fans of Inotia series, this is a must play installment as you will not help but wonder what kind of monsters and enemies you will encounter next. The game has plenty of surprises along the way, how does gathering body parts to prevent more zombies being raised by a necromancer sound to you? And for the Inotia initiated, you know there isn?t much a story to follow, rather you are here for interesting quests and to explore a new world. The graphics didn?t change much, so for those who are expecting retina sharp images in this installment, sorry to say you won?t find it. But new or veteran to the series, if you are an RPG gamer, Inotia 3 has all the ingredients that make a good and long journey. Pick a weapon and get in on the action now!

Ratings (scale of 1 to 5):

Graphics: - 4 - Nice graphics, but not much improvement over the last game.Sound: - 4.5 - Relaxing background music with lots of sound FX. Controls: - 5 - Menus are easy to understand, that?s not a small feat for a complex RPG system. Controls are smooth.Gameplay: - 5 - Very meaty gameplay, lots of surprises, lots of monsters and varied quests.

Playing Hints and Tips:

- You might get into a situation where there are multiple enemies are nearby, if you can?t win fighting them all at once, just move closer to one of them and lure it away as it will follow you, then you can fight them one after another.

- When you get a party of heroes together, switch your controls among them. The leading hero (the one you control) often takes more damage, so if you switch them around, you will leave others to recover more.